A prayer in music for dancer/mime and orchestra, in which the highly-detailed score of gestures for the former, drawn from the devotional vocabulary of various religions, creates an atmosphere in which the spatialized music of the orchestra can resonate. A deeply felt process of merging contemporary Western culture and the Eastern tradition within an essential but highly evocative stage setting.

Statement by Marco Angius

The adventure of Inori appears ideal to us today, because it leads beyond the common limits of conceiving a collective musical event and its visionary sound epiphany. What kind of music is Inori? An abstract liturgy led by a silent adorer positioned a few meters above the orchestra, making ritual gestures borrowed from various cults. Not a linear choreography, but a transferred dramaturgy that traces esoteric correspondences between the human body and the body of sound. Convinced that it is no longer possible to make music with music, Stockhausen develops his own chemistry of sound in a formula of 13 notes/gestures that embrace all the parameters of composition: as the minutes go by, we begin to recognize in this virtual melody an innere Stimme that concretizes the utopia of a song that cannot be heard. The praying figure must sometimes conduct in an extremely stylized manner (sometimes the conductor repeats his gestures like a follower) and we remain uncertain as to whether the timbric reactions are fostered by these movements or vice-versa.